Pynchon, Rand, school reading lists

[jbor at bigpond.com]

>  http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/education/14175174.htm
>
> "Not surprisingly, the College Board's 101 Great Books, suggested for 
> college-bound students, include very few of the contemporary works 
> that populate district lists. Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, James Agee, 
> Herman Melville and Thomas Pynchon all make the cut, but not the 
> perennial favorites of school districts like Amy Tan, J.R.R. Tolkien
> and Ayn Rand."

Rand's _We, The Living_ gets taught quite a bit in schools. It's 
semi-autobiographical and quite readable, if soap operatic and not 
particularly well written, and is actually a pretty interesting 
(however biased) primary source depicting ignorance, corruption and 
oppression under the Soviets into the 1920s. _The Fountainhead_ and 
_Atlas Shrugged_ are worse (because longer), but Rand is still hugely 
popular and very influential, particularly in the U.S. Her novels are 
Harold Robbins-ish in plot and heft, but with an insidious 
capitalistic, elitist, "egoism and selfishness are virtues" propaganda 
message which Americans in particular seem to find appealing.

Howard Roark in _The Fountainhead_ is supposedly loosely based on Frank 
Lloyd Wright. The 1949 film version was big budget, and Rand wrote the 
screenplay. Shee was also one of the driving forces of the HUAC 
communist witchhunts in Hollywood.

Pynchon's Mafia Winsome in _V._ is an obvious parody of Rand, and that 
and other bits and pieces in the novel suggest that he had read at 
least some of her work.

(I suspect that the only Pynchon that gets taught in secondary schools 
over there is _The Crying of Lot 49_, though I've long said that 'The 
Secret Integration' would be a great addition to any high school 
English Lit. syllabus.)

best